Here's a little background info for starters...
I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1953 and moved to
Lexington, Kentucky. when I was 5 years old. I grew up in Lexington,
then attended college at Purdue
University where I got my BS and MS degrees in Electrical
Engineering. After college I began working for Hewlett-Packard Co.. I am
currently employed as an IC process engineer at
Avago Technologies.

My wife Lynn and I have two children, Jennifer and Brian. We live in Ft.
Collins, Colorado. Jennifer works as a nurse in Denver,
while Brian is a sophomore at Front Range Community College
where he is majoring in Computer Science.

This picture was taken several years ago when we were
on vacation at Hilton Head Island in South Carolina (it doesn't
really look like Colorado, huh?).

Computer Chess

I first started working on chess programming in about 1978 and
for some crazy reason I'm still at it, although I really don't
spend much time on it anymore. I started by writing a
move generator and very simple search routine and evaluation
function in BASIC. I then rewrote the program in FORTRAN and
added the capability to search up to 5 plies selectively on an
HP1000 computer at work. This version probably played at about
the 1400 level while searching a whopping 40 nodes/second. Next I
switched to PASCAL and experimented with various selective search
techniques, but made little improvement in playing strength. In
1986 I got a PC at home and rewrote the program again, this time
in C. I followed the more conventional approach of depth first
alpha-beta search. This version was considerably stronger
tactically, playing at about the 1650 level on an 8 Mhz 80286.
In 1987 I posted the source code on the rec.games chess newsgroup.
It can still be downloaded as the SCP (Stanback Chess Program).
I continued to improve the program and in 1987-88 I contributed
my program to become the GnuChess program. My final version can be
downloaded by clicking
here. Update October 2008 --
Jim Ablett added Winboard support and I added sudden death time control
and time increment and fixed a couple bugs with the hash
table. Here is the updated version
Gnuchess_201_ja.zip.
Several other programmers have modified this version since that
time, but I haven't kept track of the changes or their impact to
playing strength. In 1989 I did a complete rewrite and called the
new program
Zarkov.
I competed in several of the ACM Chess Tournaments as well as the
1989 World Computer Chess Championships and greatly enjoyed these
events due to the friendly atmosphere and the presence of other
programmers as nutty as myself. Zarkov isn't very competetive
these days, but I still have fun experimenting with various ideas.

Masters Swimming

Having swum competitively when I was younger I find that
swimming is still my favorite form of exersize. I swim about
three times a week with the
Vortex Masters Swim Team.
Our workouts are typically about 4000 yards and it feels really good
when I've finished a workout. I keep threatening to enter meets
more than once or twice a year ...

I like to fool around with computers. My current computer
has an ASUS K8N-E motherboard with an Athlon 64 at 2.4 Ghz running Windows XP.
I've also got a Shuttle SS51G computer hooked up to my TV and
stereo receiver.

Photography

One of my favorite things to do with my computer is fiddle with
pictures from my Canon S400 digital camera. I got the camera
a couple years ago and it fits in my pocket and sort of takes decent
pictures, but I guess one of these days I'll get a digital SLR such as
the Canon EOS20D or something similar. I use Photoshop Elements and
Irfanview to manipulate images. Maybe I should post a "picture of the month" on
this web page, but at the rate I update my page it would be a
"picture of the year" or worse.

Music

I enjoy listening to a variety of music and it's nice
to be able to play MP3's on my computer and my Ipod Nano.
Some of my all-time favorite artists are
Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Marley.